Daft Punk’s Electroma ( G)

THE duo that is French synth out­fit Daft Punk came by their name when work­ing as a gui­tar band un­der the moniker Dar­lin’. Melody Maker noted at the time that the mu­sic pro­duced by the band was lit­tle more than ‘‘ daft punk’’ and the in­sult stuck. May I sug­gest that as movie direc­tors they swap their name to Daft Film? Daft Punk’s Electroma fea­tures two ro­bots walk­ing, driv­ing, walk­ing while melt­ing, then dy­ing. The crit­i­cal drama of the movie re­volves around the pair get­ting some form of syn­thetic hu­man faces. A good part of the film is taken up watch­ing th­ese faces melt grotesquely in the sun. It would be kind and mod­ern to sug­gest the plot was min­i­mal­ist, less so to sug­gest there’s half an idea here stretched to break­ing point. It was no sur­prise to learn that the film was an ex­ten­sion of Daft Punk’s de­ci­sion to di­rect their last two mu­sic videos. They got in the mood and kept go­ing, and they claim that they ‘‘ cre­ate with­out any rules or stan­dards’’. Of course it isn’t all bad. Electroma has a vis­ual qual­ity that makes it hard to look away and the com­plete lack of di­a­logue, com­bined with lit­tle plot, cre­ates an in­ter­est­ing ten­sion. Maybe you keep watch­ing be­cause your mind has been trained to ex­pect some­thing — any­thing — and so you sit there as the ro­bots drive and drive and drive, then walk and walk and walk, then die and die and die. The sound­track, though, is good. It is not by Daft Punk.